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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mlund" data-source="post: 6066250" data-attributes="member: 50304">No. Someone used the example of a player enamored of the iconic movie-poster image from Conan the Barbarian making the Greatsword their character's signature weapon. Meanwhile the actual Howard story depictions of Conan are also a great depiction of why a Fighter should be still be death-on-wheels even armed with a pair of chop-sticks. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Longswords do slashing damage. That's not slashing damage. So much for realism. You can get a whip around someone's throat and strangle them to death / crush their throat / snap their neck too, but that's all taken care of in the abstractions layer. D&D combat mechanics are spun almost entirely from abstractions to pace and balance the game and the accommodation of fantasy tropes - not reality.Swords work in D&D the way they do because the kind of completely unrealistic, trope-based fight scenes in like in BBC's Merlin series are more fun and more the expectation / demand of the customer base than real-life swords-and-plate combat like Derren was kind enough to link to examples of.It's not about realism - it's about tropes-of-choice.If no one has cool magic weapons then, no, it shouldn't matter at all.If Dave's character has a +3 magic longsword because the DM thinks swords are cool or the random loot table happens to be weighted to those results while Bob's character is still stuck with the stock crossbow that can become an issue. The relative rarity of weapons is an optional setting feature. Play in Oerth anywhere around the Pomarj some time and you'll be awash in whips, axes, and spears and have a real hard time finding a decent sword, hammer, or longbow. If the consensus at the table is to play in a sandbox where weapon rarity is an issue that's definitely their option and I doubt anyone who threw in with such an idea is going to bat an eye that off-beat weapons are harder to come by.Oh, come on. Other than the "Dwarven" part it's not that far a cry from a Dancing Sword, it just comes back to your hand faster. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Or whatever the appropriate craft is, yes, certainly - or at least the ability to convert / cannibalize one magic weapon into another. I'm actually very much opposed to the notion that by default to have a magic item come into being there needs to be a magic-user in the mix. There are a lot of other fantasy tropes about how magical items and artifacts come into being other than, "A Wizard Did It." I'm quite partial to the "Awakened Item" trope, myself.- Marty Lund</blockquote>

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